Swung by my favorite local bookstore this afternoon (and, for regular readers who wonder why I seem to do this so often, I might point out that said bookstore is like, 7/10ths of a mile from my house). I picked up George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline after numerous reader suggestions and more or less enjoying his later collection, Pastoralia (review this week?).
I don’t think the lousy iPhone pic conveys how aesthetically pleasing this tpb version of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaiden’s Tale is. It’s an oversized version, really. I used to own the book but a student permanently “borrowed” it (yes, a guy who posts under the scaredynym “Biblioklept” shouldn’t complain about book theft, but still . . .), and anyway, the version I owned was a cheap mass market paperback copy that I got my mom to buy for me at an airport years ago in Australia, so of course it had no special sentimental value, right?
Biblioklept 
== Commiseration from this Corner ==
Decades ago, I lent a (hard-back) book to a neighbor. When he finally returned it, I found that he’d used a red ballpoint pen to underline numerous passages. In the annals of (unintended) malice, this sacrilege ranks just a few degrees of above one’s bending the pages of a (borrowed) paperback firmly against its spine in order to hold the damned book in one hand.
Learning from offense No. 1, I’d sooner GIVE a book to a prospective reader than to lend it. — Larry W. Bryant (8 Nov 11)
LikeLike
Last month I read Saunder’s ‘In Persuasion Nation’ and thoroughly enjoyed it. His (outwardly) playful narratives conceal a deeper
sub-text.
LikeLike